Time to get back to Boizot's basics

Peter Boizot opened the first PizzaExpress in Wardour Street in London's West End in 1959 as he was fed up with being unable to find a decent pizza in England. In these days of extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, risotto and parmesan shavings, it is a little difficult to gauge the radical nature of Mr Boizot's original venture. Most people's experience of Italian food was out of a tin. Wimpy bars and fish and chip shops were the most common venues for eating out.

PizzaExpress, with an Enzo Apicella design of tiled functionalism and cool funk, offered something better. The democratic sophistication of what quickly became a chain was as much a part of the capital's zeitgeist in the 1960s as the Beatles, Carnaby Street and cannabis.

The styling of the design may have marked the restaurants out in the high street but it was by sticking to the tried and tested formulas of Neapolitan pizza making that Mr Boizot persuaded customers to come back again and again.

The pizzas were large, thin and crisp, and the toppings were classic, straight off the pizzeria menus of Italy. After Mr Boizot relin quished control of the company in 1993, the commercial success seems to have continued unchecked.

The standard of the food, however, has fallen sharply. The last time I visited a PizzaExpress to try out their new range, I remarked on the incredible shrinking pizza, the sogginess of the base, the inedible horror of the "new" topping, the expense and the continuing attractions of the formula. The success of PizzaExpress, I concluded, is based on its familiarity. "It represents safe eating, the Angus Steak House of our vegetarian days. In a soulless kind of way, it's not a bad place to eat. It fits nicely into that space before or after a film or the theatre."

Let's hope that any new incarnation of the chain will mean a return to Mr Boizot's basics. Decent pizzas are still hard to come by.